I’ve recorded a screencast to motivate using the command line.
The video is longer than it’s supposed to be; I probably could have removed one of the examples, but had trouble deciding which. I would appreciate feedback especially on focusing one’s time in screencasts.
Demotivating Experience
As an undergraduate, I two courses in which the content was challenging and interesting, the discussions were exciting, and the reading was eye-opening, but the instructors used their grading largely as a way to demonstrate power over their students; the game, as it were, was rigged. Instead of reflecting topic comprehension, grades reflected how magnanimous the professor was feeling on that day. For me, the demotivating aspect in these situations wasn’t the inconsistent grading; it was how the other students reacted. Both courses contained freshmen students, who started their university careers being told, and accepting without question, that their marks required as much cunning or obsequiousness as they did actual studying. I think that, as an instructor, it’s easy and a constant temptation to keep one’s students below one — stopping just short of teaching them everything they would need to understand at one’s own level. Thus, I think, it something (perhaps born of insecurity) that one has to guard against while teaching.